I’ve often been asked, “Is writing lonely?” Some people even say, “I could never do that! I’d be bored out of my mind.” Fascinating characters will help you overcome loneliness. They’ll make you want to spend as much time with them as you can. Why? Because they’ll be real to you in the world you’ve created for them. When you’re away from your story, you’ll miss those characters.

When you create characters, you want them to be so much fun that real life becomes boring. Hell, the way I see it – writing is make believe so you get to play God. So make the character beautiful. Give him perfect teeth. Give her the boob job you always wanted. Give them lots of money. Give them coke habits. Make them lovable but with fatal flaws. That way you’ll want to root for them and chastise them. Make their worlds so damn exciting that you’d never want to leave. When you do this, you’ll enjoy your work and you’ll want to work longer because it’ll no longer seem like work.

When you miss your character, you’ll yearn to write. By writing real characters in to life, you’ll never be alone. Your new characters will be like close friends or family members. You’ll become entrenched in the daily details of your characters’ lives. Writing often gets more arduous or lonely because your characters are underdeveloped, boring people you’d never want to visit. Everyone has friends who are fun and some who are boring. We tend not to be in touch with the boring ones as much. It’s not that they’re not our friends. We’d just rather be with exciting people. We like characters and unpredictability. We like sexy. We like swag.

As a man, when I’m writing about a sexy female character I get a rush from describing her. I’m describing a woman I’d want to be with sexually. I’d want to romance this woman. It’s fun and fulfilling to play liaisons out with this woman in my head – oftentimes much more fulfilling than what’s going in my real life. When I visit this character while writing, I’m excited and aroused. I’m not lonely at all because my imagination is in full gear of what I’d perhaps like to do with her sexually. I know this sounds perverted. But writers are perverse. We push the envelope to make better art.

The point is, writing doesn’t have to be lonely. If you create memorable characters you miss when don’t see or hear from them, you’ll be attracted to them as they’ll be much more fascinating than the ones you’re around in real life. When that happens, my friend, you’ll have done a wonderful job.